Clearly I must call this one "Bottoms Up"

The gas man came over today to turn on the gas for our fireplace. Getting our fireplace to wake up after summer vacation is always tricky, and it usually involves the gas man being knelt down  looking at the wires underneath the freestanding fireplace fixture, butt in the air, for extended lengths of time. This hasn't been a problem for AKA the past two seasons we've been here. But times have changed, and instead of being completely (blissfully)  tuned out to things people are doing around her, she is now absolutely obsessed with other people and wants to talk to them all, touch them all, ask everyone we see a million weird questions (like "are you a little baby?" "are you a her?" etc), etc. And I'll throw in another ETC here just for good measure.

One of AKA's current obsessions involving other people is, unfortunately, their butts. Thankfully she has not picked up on the word "butt" yet, nor "ass." Instead, she says "bottom," and to AKA, bottoms are more often than not, "silly." Recently she yelled to the roofers up on the neighbor's house as a line of them were bent over: "YOU HAVE A SILLY BOTTOM!" Also to note, AKA has no volume control so everything comes out like a loud speaker.

So today was one of those horror movie-equivalent moments of suspense for me as I looked from the gas man's butt, to AKA who was about a foot away from him, with her back to him, standing directly in front of the tv (her usual tv-watching position) completely immersed in watching Word Girl. But it was like a ticking time bomb. I knew at any moment she would turn around and have an up-close view of the gas man's rear end (thankfully, he was not showing crack) and 1. best case scenario: an untold degree of terrible exclamations would be made to this man 2. worst case scenario: she would smack it.

WELL THANK YOU GOD, that she did not smack that man on the butt. THANK YOU!

But she did burst into hysterical and rather startling cackling. At first she was laughing so hard she wasn't able to get out the words that I knew were coming. In the meantime, as the gas man remained upended in front of us and oblivious to the ruckous, I was desperately putting my fingers to my lips, pointing to things in the room to distract her, waving my arms and making all sorts of probably really weird faces to prevent the words that I knew were inevitable--so nothing left to do but just close my eyes and put my hands over my face as she yelled at the man:

"YOU HAVE A SILLY BOTTOM!!!!!"